The Harmony of Natural Law

In her Dec. 15 letter responding to my December
6th editorial-page piece "A Scopes Trial for the '90s"
Eugenie Scott claims that Prof. Kenyon and I misunderstand the
nature of science. What she means, of course, is that we understand
itand its current arbitrary prohibitionsall too well.
The Kenyon case underscores a fact that Dr. Scott and others in
the full-time evolution lobby would prefer not to face: highly-qualified
colleagues now contest her rigidly materialistic view of
science.

Instead of responding to this challenge, Dr. Scott simply reasserts
her methodological credoall scientific explanations must
be materialisticas if that should settle the matter. Yet
questions of appropriate method must be debated every bit as much
as competing theories. Origin-of-life scientists must now decide
whether theorists are free to follow evidence wherever it might
lead or whether they may consider only certain kinds of explanations
as Dr. Scott insists.

This debate will not go away. With recent developments in probability
and complexity theory, the detection of intelligent design has
already entered science proper. NASA's $100 million search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is based upon the ability
to detect the statistical and mathematical signature of intelligently
encoded messages.

To Prof. Kenyon the presence of biochemical messages and a
corresponding molecular grammar in the cell strongly suggests
a prior intelligent design. He may be wrong or he may be right.
What is certain is that his argument is based neither on ignorance
nor religious authority. Instead, he has made an inference from
biological data informed by a sophisticated consideration of the
informational sciences.

It no doubt serves the purposes of Dr. Scott and Dr. Hafernick
at SFSU to portray Prof. Kenyon as a religious fundamentalist
unwilling to revise dogma in the face of new evidence. By now
it must be clear that it is their fundamentalism, not Prof. Kenyon's,
that is on trial.